A little bit about Ecwid

Ecwid provides easy-to-use online store setup, management, and payment solutions. The company was founded in 2009, with the goal of enabling business-owners to add online stores to their existing websites, quickly and without hassle.

The company has a freemium business model: Users can sign up for free, and unlock more features as they upgrade to paid packages.

Ecwid’s partnership with WiderFunnel

In November 2016, Ecwid partnered with WiderFunnel with two primary goals:

To increase initial signups for their free plan through marketing optimization, and

To increase the rate of paid upgrades, through platform optimization

This case study focuses on a particular experiment cycle that ran on Ecwid’s step-by-step onboarding wizard.

The methodology

Last Winter, the WiderFunnel Strategy team did an initial LIFT Analysis of the onboarding wizard, and identified several potential barriers to conversion. (Both in terms of completing steps to setup a new store, and in terms of upgrading to a paid plan.)

The lead WiderFunnel Strategist for Ecwid, Dennis Pavlina, decided to create an A/B cluster test to 1) address the major barriers simultaneously, and 2) to get major lift for Ecwid, quickly.

The overarching goal was to make the onboarding process smoother. The WiderFunnel and Ecwid optimization teams hoped that enhancing the initial user experience, and exposing users to the wide range of Ecwid’s features, would result in more users upgrading to paid plans.

Ecwid’s two objectives ended up coming together in this test. We thought that if more new users interacted with the wizard and were shown the whole ‘Ecwid world’ with all the integrations and potential it has, they would be more open to upgrading. People needed to be able to see its potential before they would want to pay for it.

The Results

This experiment ran for four weeks, at which point the variation was determined to be the winner with 98% confidence. The variation resulted in a 21.3% increase in successful paid account upgrades for Ecwid.